First, here is the abstract:

The Psalms contain many allusions and also direct references to the temple and temple ritual and are one of the few windows we have into the religious experience of the First Temple in Jerusalem. This paper will attempt to shed some light on ritual practices alluded to in the Psalms that I will argue were central to the ritual system of that Temple. Dr. Silviu Bunta, in a recent publication, argues that 1 Enoch 14 should not, as is commonly argued, be understood as the earliest example of the ascent to heaven motif in Jewish literature, but that Ezekiel’s vision in Ezekiel 1 should be seen as a temple vision and, thus, as an earlier, biblical account of an ascent to heaven.  Moving a step beyond Bunta’s conclusions, I argue that the heavenly ascent motif can be traced even further back, into the pre-exilic traditions of Solomon’s Temple, as illustrated by a number of pre-exilic Psalms and other biblical traditions, and that a ritualized ascent into heaven to see the face of God was one of the central features of the temple cult.  Descriptions of temple pilgrimages, festal processions, passage through temple gates, divine theophanies, and other religious experiences involving the temple can be seen to parallel key elements of the later heavenly ascent literature.

Ascending Into the Hill of the Lord: The Psalms as a Key to Understanding the Rituals of the First Temple

If interested, please check out the post at: http://www.millennialstar.org/psalm-24-temple-gates-and-guardians/

“The Aleinu Prayer and the Pardes Story: Major Trends in Hekhalot Literature Research”

(Via James Davila at PaleoJudaica.com)

It has come to my attention (via her blog Forbidden Gospels) that Rice University Professor of Biblical Studies, April DeConick, will be a part of an extended research seminar that will be studying how different religions/cultures have prepared themselves for the “afterlife journey” that they anticipate having to traverse at death, including religious teachings and practices.

From her blog:

The semester is a week advanced and this year I am facilitating a Mellon Seminar. The topic? Mapping Death: Religious Preparations for the Afterlife Journey. The Seminar consists of myself, five graduate students from various departments (Religious Studies, French Studies, and Anthropology) and a webmaster. We are in the process of developing a webpage for the Seminar, so if you are interested you can track our progress.

Each student has an individual research project to work on, and then we are collaborating in terms of method and theory, sharing our approaches with each other. It is an exciting seminar and I am so pleased to be part of it. My own individual research project involves mapping ancient Gnostic metaphysics and praxis.

Here is a short description of the seminar:

This is a collaborative research seminar consisting of fellows working on cross-culturally mapping death journeys and religious preparations for them in order to investigate the relationship between the anticipated afterlife journey and the group’s metaphysics and praxis. The fellows will be engaged in the creation and cultivation of a rich interdisciplinary approach to the comparative study of traditions, a ‘new’ history-of-traditions approach that is conscious of the historical contexture of traditions, their referentiality, confluence, communal generation and conveyance, responsiveness, changeability, accumulative nature, and variability in transmission. Members will be working on individual research projects related to the seminar’s mission and their dissertations. At the end of the year, they will present their final projects in a roundtable symposium that also will feature invited papers from three external scholars who will visit the seminar at various sessions during the Spring semester. The papers from the symposium will be edited for publication in a volume.

I will be keeping a close eye on this seminar to see what they up with and look forward to the subsequent publication. This is an important topic and the research done will be significant for anyone interested in Temple studies (and Heavenly Ascents!) — preparation for the “afterlife journey” is one of the main purposes of the Temple, both ancient and modern.

I have met April DeConick and some of her graduate students and I highly respect the work that they do there at Rice University. You can expect it to be very professional and methodologically sound.

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: Bob Kraft e-mails:

I just returned from the Papyrology Congress in Geneva, and you will be interested in the paper by Dirk Obbink (Oxford), “A New Fragment of Ezekiel’s Exagoge from Oxyrhynchus.” According to the abstract, this “newly identified papyrus … preserves the earliest textual witness to the Hellenistic tragedy Exagoge by Ezekiel. … The new papyrus attests the widespread circulation of this work and affords a unique opportunity to view its textual paradosis and graphic presentation in literary circles in Roman Oxyrhynchus.” The handout provided a critical edition of the text and comparison with other witnesses.

This text is a retelling of the Exodus story in the form of a Greek verse drama by the Hellenistic author Ezekiel the Tragedian. (We covered this in my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha course some years ago. And for much more, see here and here.) Apart from this manuscript, it survives only in quotations (and quotations of quotations) by later writers. Assuming, that is, that this is a manuscript of the Exagoge and not one of the later embedded quotes. Still, an actual manuscript of the work of Alexander Polyhistor would be pretty cool too.

The website for the 26th International Congress of Papyrology is here.

I am very interested in this text as I gave a paper on the Exagoge at last year’s SBL conference (I have also mentioned it on this blog, here and here and here). It is a very interesting text that deals with the enthronement of Moses on a heavenly throne. The most peculiar aspect of the text is that the divine figure who is on the throne actually gets off, seating Moses in his place. There is much debate regarding the identity of the figure who was previously enthroned.